Why You Should Learn to Cook

A recent survey conducted by a food industry consultant Eddie Yoon (printed here and reported on elsewhere) finds that 90% of American adults hate to cook. This 90% is comprised of folks who don’t know how to cook, don’t like to cook, or do it reluctantly some of the time. They are purchasing pre-packaged food (fresh, frozen and dried) in grocery store isles as well as in take-and-go options such as Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, as well as the familiar fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and Subway.

That leaves just 10% of Americans who continue to prepare food from fresh ingredients and who have mastered at least the basic skills once taught to most middle schoolers in Home Economics.  In his article, Yoon advises the major suppliers of groceries to get with the trend and embrace more technology in food preparation as well as diversifying their ownership in alternative on-the-go food restaurants or brands that show an upward trend. The writing is on the wall on this, he advises. There seems to be no turning back.

If this is the case, and most of the industry is turning to preparing food for us and seeing the kitchen as a place to store food and eat it, but not prepare it, why should you buck the trend and get firmly in the minority food lane and learn to cook? I can think of several reasons, all of which are quite important to me. Maybe one or more might be important to you, too.

  1. Your long-term health and the health of your children. Why are we an obese nation and just keep getting fatter no matter how hard we try to slim down? Because we let other people prepare our food for us, filling us with unseen but powerful fats, salt, artificial fillers and preservatives and chemical flavors. Even with the recent trend to label the calorie content of your Big Mac or Chipotle burrito bowl, most of us will eat more than our bodies need if a meal is presented to us on our plate and we are in a social (loud, busy and people-centered) environment.
  2. Cooking is a human art, and it’s crazy to lose what we have spend tens of thousands of years figuring out as a species. I am particularly thinking about the women who have throughout the generations toiled in field, barnyard and kitchen to feed their families. Using tools and ingredients common to their culture, it has been the traditional work of women to manage the preparation of food for families in their homes. I’m not willing to give this part of my gender identity over to some multinational corporation. I want to know something of what my grandmothers and earlier generations passed down to one another, in prosperous times and in depressed.
  3. Food is a gift of God to and in creation, and when I am gardening, or shopping, or cooking at home, I am participating in the work and renewal of creation. Am I thinking such high theological thoughts when I am boiling my brown rice and marinading my chicken breasts? Uh, no. But give me a minute and I will tell you that I pray with my family over our dinners and I pause to think about the gift that good food is in a world in which so many are starving. I marvel at how many wonderful foods are available to me in America. And how many will keep me healthy.
  4. Real food is more than fuel. Real food is medicine and learning about and committing to preparing it creatively is community building. It is a creative necessity, and a way for families to take time out daily to look at one another and talk face to face in their home. Children who eat dinner with their families grow to have a sense of belonging in their families, know their parents better, learn to talk with adults, and have so many less food addiction and eating disorder issues than their peers who don’t have families who eat together. And in these families, children can slowly and with confidence learn to cook so they can eventually cook for themselves as adults.

With the fantastic television shows about cooking that are on right now, you’d think we would all be inspired. Apparently not. Even the Great British Bake Off can make food preparation look like the work only of experts. We all have to eat. I just want to eat well, eat to care for my family, eat to keep this amazing human art form alive. It’s not impossible. If you can reluctantly learn a thing or two about sifting flour in 7th grade, I know that you can learn as an adult by reading a good simple recipe, getting the right ingredients, getting a few essential tools, and having patience as you become better skilled. Your body will be healthier, your mind clearer, your budget better balanced, and your family life calmer. It’s worth your time.

Touching Home Base

Over ten years ago, during the most difficult part of my career as a parish pastor, I took a quick summer trip back East with my two young children to visit my family. We flew in, and my parents picked us up from the airport. Toward the end of that visit, I coerced my parents into taking the 100 mile trip from their home to the town of my childhood. Though we had talked about it weeks before on the telephone (and what seemed at the time, promises were made), it took several tries before I could get at least one of them to agree to go along.

I’d love to see Fairfield again, I said. I haven’t been back since high school, over 30 years ago. As I talked, I could see from their faces that my desire struck them as odd. Though my grandparents on my mother’s side had continued to live there long after we left, and lived in their home until their deaths many, many years later, the relatively close town of my childhood held little interest for my parents. I pushed. Finally we agree to go on the Friday before our departure home. No, don’t take our car, my father decided; I’ll drive us all.

In the flurry of that morning, I explained again to my children where we were going, and why. How I had spent the first 12 years or so of my life in a quiet town on the shore of Long Island Sound. That I remember long, humid days of summer spent on the beach. How I learned to swim in those salty waters, and how I watched the yearly fireworks in the growing dark, wrapped in a heavy sweatshirt with my feet in the still-warm sand. They weren’t all that interested, of course.

How long will it take to get there? What are we going to do once we’re there? How long do we have to stay? I knew the moment my father started the car that I was surrounded by obliging parents and resigned children. With my husband back in Minnesota, I was on this return journey more or less alone.

The miles clipped by with my lead-footed father at the wheel, dodging in and out of traffic as if he had a plane to catch. Time and again I closed my eyes in prayer as I saw how closely he cut some of his lane changes. I told him a couple of times that there was no rush; he snapped back that he was trying to get ahead of the traffic. My mother looked relaxed as she sat up front watching the miles go by. I smiled at my children, who were doing their very best just to fit into their mom’s plan ; we looked out the back seat windows at the passing towns.

When we arrived in town, I did my level best to Pay Attention and Remember. We drove by the post office, the high school, the railroad underpass near downtown. We had lunch at our family’s old favorite hot dog restaurant, still grilling dogs after 40 years. I shared greasy french fries with my children who hate relish, onion and mustard. We left there to find our old neighborhood. A place of sweeping mental vistas shrank down to a portion of town with tight, old roads and tiny Cape Cod houses. As we drove down a street, I was startled to realize my father, the man who was certain of everything, didn’t remember our old address. I did. We slowed, and looked.

We got out and even found our former neighbor at home, home bound, in a wheelchair. When she saw me, she called me by my mother’s name. I was amazed at her memory. We smiled together for a few minutes, marveling at the years that had passed.

Back into the car, the kids were asking me about the beach. The beach. We headed that way, passing by one of my elementary schools, and the site of the life-altering car accident my parents and their children survived. When we drove by it, I glanced at my parents whose jaws seem set against the memory. I took a deep breath. Here it was. And here I am again.

The beach road took us to a small, pot-holed blacktop parking lot in front of a old, but well-loved town beach house. The afternoon had heated up, and we climbed out of the car ready to just relax for a while. I had come prepared with my bathing suit under my clothes, and offered my children their suits. They declined. Suit yourself, I said with a smile. My mother, who had spent those countless days hauling her three children to and from this beach for years on summer breaks seemed unfazed. I was excited, and began to walk with our small group up the steps and through the sand-polished, gritty open deck to the stairs down to the beach.

Perhaps it was the trick of memory, or the natural erosion of water upon the land, but the beach was quite narrow, and comprised of more pebbles than sand.  We joined a dozen or so families of small children on the beach as I turned to look at the horizon, the view I had seen countless times before. A wide expanse of moving blue-gray water. Seagulls. A cargo ship. I walked down to the water’s edge and stepped in; it was warm. I stood still, and thanked God for the moment: touching home base.

My father stayed on a bench by the beach house with my first-born who refused to come onto the sand. My daughter and mother walked the shoreline for awhile, picking up shells and talking together as they looked at me out of the corner of their eyes. I dropped my hand into the water, and licked my fingers, tasting the old, familiar salt of the Sound. The moment was passing. I looked for the blurry brown of horizon where five miles out was another beach front on Long Island, New York. I breathed the salty, warm air. I could feel my family waiting me out behind me. I turned to take in the Connecticut shoreline, the houses, piers, boats and bathers I could see. I walked slowly out of the water, and turned once more toward the Sound. I liked what I saw. And it was time to leave.

We shuttled back to the car, ready for a couple more hours of driving back to the other side of the state. We’d be home before dinner time. As the conversation in the car turned toward other things, and what we saw and would see as we drove, I thought about what it means to go home again, to return to a favorite place in early memory. It’s not that you can’t go home again, I think. You just have to want to go and be able to see your memories, and the present, as two separate visions of the very same thing.

You Can Go Home Again

For better or worse, we first learn about making and keeping relationships in our families. During our formative years, our parents establish patterns with us; patterns of connection and separation, of independence and dependence, of give and take, that literally shape our developing brains and how they work for the rest of our lives.
The problem, of course, is that this is a very imperfect process. Our parents have inherited their own patterns from their own parents, families and culture and combined them into their own style. Very few of these emotional patterns are conscious; we rarely notice or examine them.  This automatic process is why family emotional patterns are so often repeated generation to generation. When they work for us, they help us develop into caring, connected, loving human beings. When they don’t work well, we can be shaped by anxiety, demands, rigid roles and expectations, and inflexible rules for behavior. Of course, most of us have a unique, messy combination of both.
One of the most emotionally charged family experiences we share are the subtle and not so subtle family expectations that swirl around “The Holidays.” Whether the holiday is Christmas, Passover or the cultural New Year, many families have traditions that involve returning “home,” visiting parents or relatives, eating, and sharing worship or rituals together year after year. For adults who have left their parental home and established an independent life, these expectations can arouse surprisingly high anxiety and worry. We can be caught off-guard by overwhelming feelings of obligation, excitement, frustration, pleasure, anger or any combination of feelings about the family traditions we know but now have a small measure of distance from. And if we add into the mix the distance and cost of travel, or the demands of college, work or a new spouse or child, it can feel like a chaotic world inside our heads.
Most of us solve this internal family stress in just a few ways.
We may promise to return home, but find a conflict at the last minute. We may go, but
bring along a friend, spouse or child, and use them as an emotional buffer. We may go and find the old emotional patterns so arousing we eat, drink, sleep, or spend too much while there. We retreat to the computer, the new novel we brought, or constantly check our smart phones for communication from the outside world. And still others of us find the whole returning to our family so stressful we end up in huge, raging family fights just when we want to be relaxed and connected.
It is hard to return home to our families. We want to behave well, but find our own reactions surprising and troubling. How can we stay connected in a more healthy way to the people and traditions we had growing up, without completely throwing them out? How can we be calmer under the stress of bad communication, or alcoholism, marital conflict, unspoken rivalries, disappointments or fear?
Family systems theory understands the family as both the source of this emotional stress as well as the soil in which new, more flexible personal patterns of connection need to grow. How can we change our point of view of family and behave in slightly more helpful, relaxed ways?
The answer is two fold.
Firstly, we must recognize that we are part of that same family that makes us so confused. We need to return to our families over time, in small amounts, and become a witness or observer of our family’s emotional process. We can enter into our family process as both participant and student. What do we notice? How do this family work? How do I participate in these patterns? What if I were to do something slightly different than before?
And secondly, we make a steady effort to talk with, deal with, and know each member of our family one to one. When we can have real, face to face relationships with the people in our extended emotional system, we stop behaving with them in old, rigid, familiar ways, and have to deal with them as people in the here and now. And not surprisingly, they have the same experience with us.
These basic emotional changes are the building blocks to creating a more flexible self when dealing with our families from a distance. We don’t have to cut our families out of our lives, and we don’t have to simply accept their unique problems and bear our burdens silently. Observe your family system, and focus on your relationships with people individually. You can go home again, with a shift in purpose and perspective, and find yourself better connected and less anxious.